James T Abbott

13-Sep-2017

Over the years unidentified objects have been reported as being of many different shapes – circles and discs, triangles, wedges or boomerangs, spheres, cubes, cigars and tubes, and a few others.

Some are seen as objects with those definite shapes while others are reported as just lights or fireballs. Some have also been reported as changing shape in the middle of the observation.

When things were first seen in the sky in Victorian and Edwardian times they were generally reported as being “airships” and artists depicted them as such. It’s a question we probably will never be able to answer but were those witnesses seeing gondolas beneath the objects and ropes and wires suspending the engines and gondolas from the main gas envelope? Or were those descriptions simply the only way that their minds could deal with a lighted cigar-shaped object in the sky?

Sceptics argue that people see what they want to see and that is why UFOs come in so many assorted shapes and sizes. Once one shape has been seen in an area, they say, other people tend to see that same shape.

If, on the other hand, the objects are real, why so many different shapes? Our own limited experience of building aircraft and spacecraft might suggest that – within tight boundaries – the shapes for any given purpose should be very similar. An aircraft until recently could be large or small but all needed a fuselage and wings and all are recognisably from the same family. More modern aircraft can be pure deltas without tailplanes but, again, the shape is not too dissimilar to earlier aircraft like (say) Concorde. Space craft are also very similar to each other – a feature which is virtually mandated by aerodynamics or – in space – by the need to hang lots of equipment from a central body.

I guess the question is – are the different shapes just people’s imaginations being allowed to run riot, or are they perhaps different because they are caused by, or come from, different sources?